In honor of the Grammy win, I present:

These artists selling signed vinyl direct on their websites is getting me. Pretty clever! I like supporting them this way, but I do wish they could find a way to reduce the shipping costs.

Eighteen months ago I visited Iceland with my family. Somewhere during that trip I was introduced to photographer Ragnar Axelsson and his striking black-and-white photos of people living in the harsh climes of the north Atlantic. Since then I’ve picked up his amazing book, Faces of the North, at the library. Highly recommended.

His photos are featured in an eye-opening New Yorker article about the hunters of Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, a small village in northeast Greenland that just celebrated it’s centennial.

This was a fun history rundown and tasting of Minnesota’s classic Grain Belt. I’ve not been keeping much beer in the fridge these past couple of years, but watching this caused me to pick up some Grain Belt sixteen ounce cans. Look at that can! Historically I’ve consumed a fair bit of Grain Belt, but always in bottles.

I have to admit, while I still like Grain Belt and, out of respect to my home state, I’d still put it on my shortlist for house macrobrew lager, I think I’m gonna give Coors Banquet a try as this channel and others speak highly of it. (The other contender on the list is ye olde Miller High Life. Also a bit sweet, though?)

RE: our BTS plans. There are two hotels next to Gillette Stadium. In my reading, it would be very ideal to land there for a concert night. But the BTS Army had sold those hotels out long ago. Or so it appeared…

I decided to check in on the hotels a few times a week in case someone cancelled. Looks like Hilton is on to this. I’m so thankful that price gouging is now apparently legal in our freedom-loving country.

I had this stored in a draft. I don’t remember how long ago the game happened. I think now’s as good a time as any for something entertaining. Just enjoy this:

Some quotes I’ve read as I’m trying to make sense of things.

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

– Benjamin Franklin

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

– The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution

Continue reading…

Literally. I don’t think I could buy these books if I wanted to (for any sort of reasonable price).

It was kind of a big day yesterday. Our family was booked to BTS’s previous tour in 2020, and the world went south. When tickets were secured, we all breathed a sigh of relief. (Especially my daughters.  😆) This time we’re going to make a trip out of it.

All the things are happening. All the things are going on.

I’m privileged in almost all of the ways. I’m fortunate in almost all of the ways. Yet it may surprise you to know that I’m also directly impacted in some ways. And injustice makes my system furious. This all hits me right in my center.

Sleep, already elusive, is now like a gift given by an abuser. My concerns fester, remaining unknowable by me until they pop out days later. Unknown, but profoundly impacting me physically, emotionally.

Stepping away from all the news and views for a reset seems the right path to get me off this wild ride. “Please place your own mask on first before assisting children or other passengers.” Back to basics. Back to daily, knowable challenges. Back to sleep. Back to better choices. Back to stable blood pressure without medication.

But what if, after closing my eyes and breathing deeply from the oxygen supply, I open my eyes only to find the plane disassembled around me?

A friend had a dream about making bare-handed catches in left field, and I immediately linked him to this:

Someone somewhere shared this lesser known, pre the Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac song and…so good!

I’m going to try setting my blog to a stream layout for a while. In my blogging history I’ve always blogged with a list-of-posts style, which is where the original design of Pika came from. It was my preference: I have an idea and an idea fits nicely with a title and if the idea isn’t somewhat fully formed, why am I sharing it? At one point I even deemed that my blog was going to only contain deeply-considered, capital-E Essays, and so any sort of streamy vibe just didn’t make sense.

When my blog became about Essays, it may not surprise anyone to learn that within months I basically stopped blogging. Thankfully I’ve been off that trip for a long time. I’m a blogger, not an essayist, after all.

Maybe I’ll try this for all of 2026? Maybe I’ll actually write some short posts without titles? Maybe with this change I’ll blog most every day? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to experiment. I also think blogging in this way will lead to a lot of Pika feature refinement as I wrestle with any shortcomings I find.

When we visited Iceland a few years ago, I ran into the fascinating existence of a poetry book branded by Bónus, one of the grocery stores that we frequented. Paging through Bónus poetry by Andri Snær Magnason, it seemed to be a legitimate book with some light theming around a grocery store and the consumerism it can represent (and Dante). It made me giggle that such a thing existed and was sold in the grocery store. Though it made sense, as learned through that trip that the Icelandic population is famous for how prolifically it writes. I couldn’t stop commenting on the book to my family.

For some reason I didn’t buy the book while we were there, but when my birthday arrived after the trip, there it was wrapped as a gift. Thank you!

It turns out this book of poetry has a lot of edgy humor. By the time the series of “You Are What You Eat” poems ends, the protagonist is stuck on his ancestral farm with only Ikea Allen wrenches as tools and driftwood to eat. Their fate is sealed. The series of poems entitled “Couple” is filled with double entendres that would make anyone blush at the checkout.

A taste of Bónus poetry:

All Off

The slogan across the can of the All Off oven
cleaner says that it works better than in the
fairytales but I don’t think my storybooks
told me how Hansel and Gretel cleaned the
oven.

The book is very sharp in its critique of the products being sold in modern, consumerist societies:

Honour

My ancestors ate everything
They ate the blood and the brain
the spleen and the spine
and the fat and the feet
and the marrow

In their honor,
I reach for McNuggets

Yeah, this is a great collection of poetry!

In the past I’ve mused about getting a writing-only workstation. This led to explorations into things like the Freewrite, AlphaSmart, or searching for “the best laptop keyboard” and buying some old, used machine from 2010.

Meanwhile, I’ve been selling older and unused electronics (etc) on eBay this winter. As I was preparing an old MacBook Air that I expected to sell for $150 (at best), I realized this was probably a great test machine to see if I enjoyed writing away from my primary workstation (potentially with wifi turned off).

To prepare for sale, I had restored this 2018 MacBook Air to factory settings. In the time it took to install iA Writer I already was asking myself, “Why is this machine so slow? It didn’t feel slow when I bought it!” So I set about minimizing the things running on the machine, which definitely isn’t the first thing I should have tried! Here’s what you should do first if you want to get an old MacBook moving quickly…

Installing an older version of macOS

The reason the MacBook Air felt so quick when I bought it, and so slow when I reset it, is that it had two different versions of macOS installed. When I purchased the computer it  had El Capitan (10.11) installed, while the factory reset installs the most-recent macOS one’s computer supports, which in this case was Sonoma (14.8.3).

So I thought things through a bit and decided to click the link at Apple support to install Big Sur (11.7). This took me to the App Store and started downloading that version, which eventually finished and told me I can’t install an older macOS version on a Mac with a newer version. Bah!

I restarted the Mac and held down Command-R to go into recovery mode. Unfortunately, this mode would only allow me to install the latest version, Sonoma. So then I restarted and held down Option-Shift-Command-R, which allows you to install “the version of macOS that came with your Mac or the closest version that’s still available.” For me, that’s El Capitan.

I had some  trouble getting El Capitan to install in recovery mode. At one point I read something about El Capitan not working on the latest Apple filesystem, APFS, so I reformatted the hard drive to an older file system. Then I was given a warning that El Capitan must install on APFS, I reformatted back to APFS, and things seemed to work. 🤷‍♂️

At this point I figured I’d just roll with El Capitan. In my ideal world this computer would use iA Writer full screen, an occasional web browser and that’s about it. As of this writing, iA Writer’s documentation says it supports macOS version 10.11, El Capitan, so all good!

In reality, when I went to install iA Writer from the App Store, I was given a warning that iA Writer only works on macOS 10.15+ (Catalina). So back I went to the Apple support link to install Catalina. From there, things have been working well. (Though I’ve found the version of Safari I get with Catalina, version 13.1.3, isn’t rendering the web well, so I’ve installed Firefox for now. Funny that I can get the latest Firefox on an old version of macOS.)

Other things I changed

I was reading an old article about a mnmlist mac setup and I updated some things:

• Hid the dock, which I do on my primary machine as well. I also hid the menu bar.

• Disabled Spotlight, including running sudo mdutil -i off in Terminal. This should speed up the system by avoiding Spotlight’s indexing. I installed Alfred, which I’ve used for many years.

• Disabled Spaces by unchecking System Preferences > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces

• Installed uBlock Origin on Firefox. Every time I accidentally hit a browser without ad blocker I’m completely aghast. (And a bit surprised that Pika isn’t more popular than it is, honestly.)

• Added a nice desktop wallpaper.

I’m sure there are other things I can to make this computer feel even more minimalist and focused. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Let’s see how it goes

I’m writing this blog post in iA Writer right now. While I love the Pika editor, I want to try writing in a focused mode. (I was also going to say that I want to write offline, but opening Pika, turning off wifi, and writing in the Pika editor be fine, especially because Pika saves one’s writing in browser local storage). Will I really pull this computer out to write? Will it really help to focus my mind? Will I like the copy-paste workflow? We’ll see.

The only real challenge with this experiment going forward is that my old MacBook is one of the last ones with a butterfly keyboard. Even ignoring the double- and missing-key mistakes it makes (thank goodness for auto-correction), I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though. And if I’m doing that, maybe an iPad with a keyboard makes more sense.

My PS5 is going to travel to college with one of my daughters, so I picked up a lightly-used one to replace it. Some points of reference if you ever are doing this and have trouble transferring data between the systems on your network.

• If your problems are similar to mine, what will happen is the step that tells you “to hold the power button on the second PS5 for 1 second until it beeps” will result in the old console preparing for transfer while the new console says it lost connection with the old console.

• Do not bother trying to do this over wifi. Just don’t even try!

• After trying three different network cables to connect your new machine to the LAN (and to be fair, your cable might be the problem), try connecting the new PS5 more directly to your router. I initially tried a perfectly fine modem > router > in-wall cable > switch > cable connection and it failed. When I moved to modem > router > in-wall cable > cable, it started working. Keep removing variables until it works.

• This is why I’m always hesitant to go lightly-used. The whole time I was questioning if the used PS5 was the problem. I hate having that question in the back of my head (though even with a new machine I might still have that question).

Anyway, let the nine-hour transfer commence!

I proofread everything I write. Still, there is no better spellchecker than the "publish" button.

– Nick Heer via People and Blogs via The Jolly Teapot

So very much this!

As a blogger of twenty-plus years, I’ve experienced this phenomenon many, many times. That is why Pika has delays built into the system. When you publish a post, it’s available on your site immediately. However, your RSS feeds do not show the post until about five minutes after publishing. If you are sending the post as a newsletter, it will not send for about fifteen minutes. When The Pika Pulse was running, there was a delay before new posts landed on the feed. And we’ll include a delay if we reintroduce a similar feature to The Pulse in the future.

Since visiting Iceland a few years ago, I’ve had a few books on my backlog list, including coffee-table-esque picture books. On a recent binge of buying used books on eBay, I picked up Iceland (Visual Explorer Guide) by Chris McNab. This is a smaller-format version of his larger Iceland: The Land of Fire and Ice.

The pictures are pretty nice. The text was fine. I don’t think I learned much from it, but it generally described what I was looking at. When finishing the book I was a bit surprised to find that all the images were stock photos!

Doing some research, this seems to be the same case for the larger-format version of the book. Given that the pictures are the standout, the real stars of these books are the picture researchers, Terry Forshaw and Justin Willsdon. And the original photographers, of course. I hadn’t really thought about how these types of books are developed, but sort of assumed the draw of such a book was the unique photographs therein; photographs with connective tissue between each other and the words on the pages.

I’m not necessarily casting shade on this sort of book. The photos are largely very good, and a picture is worth a thousand words, they say. It’s a bit…off, though, to have someone captioning a picture of fish drying on a windy, exposed hill without the writer having been there to feel the breeze nor smell the smells.

It turns out if you want such an authentic experience, you’re probably looking at spending a fair bit more money to find short-printed editions from actual photographers, such as Ragnar Axelsson. Artist-discussed, location-based photography books are most likely printed near their subjects, unlike the McNab book being printed in China. That’s one more quality you should expect to pay for.

As a lifelong spendthrift, I continue to push myself as best I can to support artists and artisans directly. I enjoy picking up visual books whose subject is my past travel destinations, and as much as I’m able I will try to purchase books that align with those desires.

We got this eReader remote (Amazon) for our daughter for Christmas and it took a little hacking to get it to work with her new Kobo Clara. Thankfully the internet is there for us! All credit goes to Reddit user BAUDR8 and his video for these instructions. I live in fear of these instructions and files disappearing. Since I’ll probably have to troubleshoot this in two years, I figured I’d document the process for posterity.

1. Download latest version of KoboRoot.tgz from GitHub tsowell/kobo-btpt. I have this file saved on my computer in case I need it in the future.

2. If your ring shows up as “D01 Pro” in Bluetooth syncing (hold down middle button for 1+ seconds until alternate flashing), the D01 Pro.zip configuration file can be used for config. At this time can download here. I also have this file saved on my computer just in case.

3. Connect the Kobo to your computer. Open the Kobo in your filesystem and navigate to the .kobo folder. (On macOS had to type cmd-shft-dot in Finder to see hidden files/folders.)

4. Place KoboRoot.tgz file in the .kobo folder. Unplug the Kobo and it will go through a reboot process. (Likely a multi-step reboot process.)

5. Reconnect the Kobo and you should now see a .btpt folder.

6. Unzip the D01 Pro.zip file to get the D01 Pro configuration file.

7. Drag the D01 Pro file to the .btpt folder. (If you see “D01” when looking at the ring while Bluetooth syncing, it might work to remove the " Pro" from the file name.)

8. Unplug your Kobo, go to Bluetooth settings, make sure the ring is in Bluetooth sync mode (hold down middle button for 1+ seconds until alternate flashing) and eventually you should be able to connect to the ring.

9. Up and down on the ring should page turn. If that doesn’t work, hold up and down for 1+ seconds, looking for a purple flash. Then it should work.

Related, this eReader is nice! I have a fancy Kindle Oasis and this snappy little thing with integrated library browsing has me a bit jealous. Since I downloaded my Kindle books in azw3 format before Amazon stopped allowing such things, I suppose I could fire up Calibre and be on my way? 🤔

I hate what drugs have done to parts of American society as much as anyone. The purveyors prey on people in a vulnerable state, a state they’ve arrived at for any of a number of reasons. The addictive qualities can be nearly impossible to resist.

While I’m not super-informed these days, news and events still cross my path. The latest of these is the American Secretary of Defense claiming that drugs are weapons. This is in order to justify bombing boats in the Caribbean Sea.

I’m uninformed. I don’t know the truth of these boats and their cargo. What I do know is that drugs are not weapons. Weapons are weapons.

If drugs from preying purveyors were weapons, we’d be bombing pharmaceutical companies   and their fleet of sales cars every other year. But we’re not. That would be ridiculous.

Oh, wait, he said “weapons of mass destruction.” Now there’s a phrase that we can trust coming out of the mouth of an American politician!

To be fair (for whatever reason), there is  a nuanced argument to be made that there is a drug epidemic and certainly as a society we would benefit from pushing toward a better position on the epidemic spectrum. Of course, there are also many and various nuanced solutions to each type of drug problem. That’s…not a conversation being had. (Are conversations even allowed anymore?)

In any case, this country has a major problem with actual weapons. A problem very few politicians care to do anything about.

Weapons are weapons. Drugs are not weapons.